This was one of our favorite games during the Chinese Ghost Month until...
If you are man, then you probably will agree with me in saying that boys have tendency to become 'firefighters' in one way with their natural 'water pipes'... However, voluntarily fire fighting jobs may not be welcomed in one particular situation...
Of course being addressed as 'uncle' at this age, I no longer do things like this along the street. So do my still surviving pals. Back to when I was around 10 years old, kids like me have not many games to play with unlike kids now who are spoiled with choices of electronic gadgets.
Kids in the 70's like to go out to fish, climb trees and create their own toys. One of those unimaginable games to us in this modern time was trying to extinguish small flames with our own pee. We even had a competition to see whose pee went the furthest. Most of those seemingly unharmed kids' game eventually brought us into trouble...
It was during one of those Chinese Ghost Months and when almost every households started to burn joss papers and incenses in front of their houses in the evening of the first day of that spooky month signifying the opening of the 'gate of hell' where those good brothers and sisters would come to the human realm for holidays.
On one particular evening, Ah Kow who was the leader of my group suggested that we would play a very unusual game. This is called the 'fire extinguishing' game the rule is simple:whoever extinguished a pile of burning joss paper would be the winner. A vote was carried out among 7 kids and only two kids wanted to play. So it was decided that only Ah Kow and I would be the contestants.
Each of us has chosen a target burning paper with a timekeeper. So said, I approached one burning fire and Ah Kow went to the one next to me. When everything was set, off we went releasing our pee.
To put it frankly, it really gave me the sensation and a sense of achievement to see the burning fire being extinguished in front of me though I didn't know how Ah Kow felt. Since we were boys, we must have the same feeling I was quite sure.
The final result was a draw and we returned home separately to have our dinner. Kids then were forbidden by adults to wander on the street at night during Ghost Months.
After taking my shower, I suddenly felt loss of appetite and my scrotum felt burning sensation and started to swell as if a puffer fish when agitated. High fever developed during the night and I saw many ghostly figures approached me and scolded me on polluting their 'money'. I started to scream in horror until my dad came to my help.
He sent me to a 24-hour clinic and the doc gave me some paracetamol tablets and discharged me as the doc thought I was merely suffering from heat stroke. My fever subsided in the morning but not my scrotum.
My mom scrutinized and grilled me until I told her what I have done last evening. She brought me to a temple to see a spirit medium and the medium asked my mom to do another apologetic food offering at the place where I peed.
So we went to the place again and I was asked to kneel down to say sorry to those spirits. Ah Kow was there with his mother too. Apparently he also experienced the same thing as me.
There was no sign that my scrotum wanted to relax after the prayer, added to that I started to have difficulty to pee, my dad decided to bring me to an old 'sinse' (Chinese TCM physician).
The 'sinse' took my pulses and then my dad relayed my story to him. The old man nodded and said: "Your boy has absorbed too much heat energy from the flames and now those heat is accumulated inside the scrotum and caused it to swell. I will give you some medicine to expel those heat inside his body."
And lucky for me, the old 'sinse' was right; after one dose of his herbal medicine I started to fart and rushed to toilet. I recovered completely after a few visits to the toilet.
It is difficult for me to judge now if my suffering were due to the punishment of those good brothers and sisters, or it is due to residual heat that has traveled through urine into my scrotum. Of course, I dared not try to pee on an open flame again.
